How did spanish rule in the Americas affect the native Americans

How did Native Americans life's changed after the Spanish did what

Encomiendas were,according to Colonial Spanish America, 'a grant of labor andtribute rights from the crown to an encomendero over aspecified group of Indians.'; The encomenderos was the manin charge of an Indian group who would demand manual laborand tribute from the Indians in exchange for payment,protection and religious instruction.

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Over the course of some two centuries following the conquests and consolidations of Spanish rule in the Americas during the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries—the period designated as the Baroque—new cultural forms sprang from the cross-fertilization of Spanish, Amerindian, and African traditions. This dynamism of motion, relocation, and mutation changed things not only in Spanish America, but also in Spain, creating a transatlantic Hispanic world with new understandings of personhood, place, foodstuffs, music, animals, ownership, money and objects of value, beauty, human nature, divinity and the sacred, cultural proclivities—a whole lexikon of things in motion, variation, and relation to one another.

Whether you imagine Columbus in the role of hero or villain, there's no denying his importance. Columbus opened the Atlantic to European explorers, adventures, merchants, and the famous conquistadores. And the process that Columbus set in motion led to the foundation of the United States about three hundred years after Columbus sailed the Ocean Blue.

The Spanish were able to colonize much of South and Central America, but the territory that later became the United States stood on the far periphery of Spain's New World empire. Only in the West did the Spanish have a serious presence in territory that's now the United States, and Spanish penetration of California and New Mexico came only in the 17th and 18th centuries.

With its goal of bringing the Catholic religion to the New World, Spain was also able to use the existing church governments for its own political uses. Today, religion and politics continue to mix in Latin America.

The often-heavy handed rule from Madrid and the new ideas of liberty and freedom coming out of the American and French Revolutions brought about the wars of Independence in the early-19th century. Simón Bolívar—the Great Liberator—and José de San Martin led the fight for independence, although this was not a fight for indigenous rights, or on behalf of the poor. Those who fought for South American independence were called criollos, American-born descendants of Spaniards, and they continued to rule the many new nations of Spanish America for generations.

There weremany long-term consequences of the European conquest of the Americas andthe global exchange that ensued. It took the Spanish only a few years to findand plunder the two wealthiest empires in the Americas. Huge silver mines foundin Mexico and Peru in the mid-16th century meant that Spain instantly became thelargest supplier of silver in the world. In the first 150 years followingconquest, the Spanish exported 32 million pounds of silver and 360,000 poundsof gold (Marks 78). Spain spent much of this wealth in costly wars in a failedattempt to rule Europe. Much of this silver eventually ended up in China, butwe’ll learn more about that later. The depopulation of large regions of theAmericas also led Europeans to search for cheap labor. Perhaps the mostimportant consequence of the Colombian Exchange was the forced migration andenslavement of millions of people.

Once an area had been conquered, it was partitioned into encomiendas, or grants of land. More importantly, the native people themselves were parceled out to the conquistadors, who were given title to the land and its people in return for a promise to teach the natives Christianity. This system was heavily abused, and Native Americans throughout the Americas were reduced to a condition of virtual slavery.

However, due to natural attrition and harsh misrule, the population of native laborers soon became too small for the voracious Spanish, so they began to import African slaves to work in sugar plantations and silver mines. The introduction of African traditions to the Native American and mestizo cultures already in existence made for a social mixture richer than in almost any other part of the world, although racism continued to play a dark role in the New World.

The Spanish-American War (1898) was a conflict between the United States and Spain that ended Spanish colonial rule in the Americas and resulted in U.S. acquisition of territories in the western Pacific and Latin America.

The name of the country was changed to ..

The traffic of Europeans to the Americas was not a one-way street. The so-called brought European goods and ideas to the New World—including the horse, which was not native to the Western Hemisphere—and returned new plants and animals to the Old World, including potatoes, corn, tomatoes and other crops. The world was forever changed by the new horizons opened by Spain's intrepid explorers, despite the misdeeds of Spanish rule in America.

Spanish conquistadors, who were primarily poor nobles from the impoverished west and south of Spain, were able to conquer the huge empires of the New World with the help of superior military technology, disease (which weakened indigenous resistance), and military tactics including surprise attacks and powerful alliances with local tribes.